I have written a few times here and a good number of times at my old blog for the Foreign Policy Association about the many and diverse reasons why the Alberta tar sands are a pox. You may agree. If so, you should be on your horse to get your comments into the US Department of State to tell them that the Keystone XL pipeline project, which will substantially enable further development of this planetary insult, should not be approved. Please go right away to the link here from 350.org and register your comments. The comment period ends soon!
The way the very conservative, oil-fed present day Canadian government tells it, all of Canada stands shoulder to shoulder in favor of the pipeline and the Alberta tar sands. The polls tell a different story: from 40 to 50% of Canadians oppose tar sands development. The distinguished Canadian political scientist, Thomas Homer-Dixon, had an op-ed recently which told a very different story from the one that the powers that be in Ottawa and Alberta tell. He wrote that, aside from the obvious environmental depredation wreaked by the development, that “There is a less obvious but no less important reason many Canadians want the industry stopped: it is relentlessly twisting our society into something we don’t like. Canada is beginning to exhibit the economic and political characteristics of a petro-state.”
I noted a couple of years ago at my old blog that the story of how most of Canada’s people are getting stuck with the bill for the tar sands was not sufficiently well understood. “The Big Grab” – The Tar Sands vs. The Rest of Canada flagged an excellent series on this from the Vancouver Observer. I also wrote at DeSmogBlog a few months before that about how it was, for all intents and purposes, a bit on the crazy side for the US government to be enabling the tar sands while at the same time the Obama administration has been working pretty hard to decarbonize our energy economy.
Barack Obama and John Kerry need every stitch of political cover they can get to do the right thing: reject the Keystone XL project. Send your comments today. Then stand with 350.org, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the hundreds of other groups that are fighting to stop this bone-headed project
